The Last Storyteller (44 page)

As my last job, I built a locked cabinet of aged fruitwood for James’s notebooks. I astonished myself—I made marquetry inlays, cut in fine detail and feather-thin stripes. This took the longest of all, and as I worked I interrupted myself to read from the notebooks I was protecting—James’s wisdom, snatches of verse, stories, cures, recipes, and quotations.

Came the day that I had no more work left to do. And could drum up none: every path, every pillar and post, every pocket of grass had been renewed. I had little facing me except to sit and look at my beautifully plastered walls. And think. And reflect. And mourn the loss of my inner decency. And seek a recovery—of any kind.

Is there any skill I admire more than any other in the world, and how would it benefit my country if I had it?

Please understand, Ben and Louise, that nothing romantic hung from my next decision. I had always leaned this way; I didn’t necessarily know that about myself—but at that moment I saw it. Hence my fascination with James; and with the hundreds of men and women, of all ages, by their firesides; and with the generations gone before them, back to the time of the bards. And hence my living obsession with John Jacob O’Neill.

He replied to my careful letter (it took me a week to draft) with two words on a postcard: “At last.” When I visited him, I assessed what he needed; a second visit set us up.

Here is the plan we made: I would apprentice myself to him as a storyteller, he would teach me everything he knew, and I would memorize all the stories he had in his head—or was prepared to tell me. I agreed without hesitation to meet his three conditions.

One: Nothing would be written down. “Back to the old days,” he said. “The druids, the bards—they kept everything in their memories.”

Two: I would see it as a true apprenticeship, with all the discipline involved. During my training I would spend as much time with him as I could.

And three: With me in tow, he might, he said, take to the road for one last week, as though traveling in the old days. I did persuade him to the concession that he would allow me to drive him.

We worked together for two years. On Monday mornings I left my house at seven o’clock and drove the long journey down the four seasons of roads. He’d insisted upon what he called “office hours”—from half past nine to six o’clock, with an hour for lunch. I made sure to dress as elegantly as I could, though never in anything other than a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie.

In the first month, I loaded my daily clothes into the closet in my room. He inspected everything, asked to see my boot polish and brushes, my shaving kit. To my socks he paid especial attention, and made me change the kind I wore. We didn’t have a vast range available to us in Ireland, but he made me buy pairs with more cushioning, of a wool less coarse.

He next put me through, in effect, a job interview. His focus centered on what he called “My own private three R’s: rising, recreation, and retiring.” And he dismissed—in his usual kindly way—my habits.

“Rise at precisely the same time every morning. Rest for at least three hours every day—one to include lunch, two around an evening meal. Retire at precisely the same time every night. And I mean retire to sleep. Allow for half an hour or so to read or to make tomorrow’s lists. But make sure that you close your eyes at the same hour of the clock seven nights a week.”

I asked him, “Why is the precision so important?”

“It will reduce your anxiety,” he said. “You of all people.”

“Does it show?”

“Takes one to know one,” he replied. “I was so anxious that I had to travel the world.”

“Were you easily frightened?”

“My own shadow startled me. Or a sudden cry from a bird.”

And so my training began. Before we reached into the area of his famous narrative expertise, he said he wanted to talk about scheduling. “How did you plot your journey around the country?”

I said, “I didn’t have a plan. Either I went where the wind blew me or I followed up contacts the Folklore Commission wanted me to pursue.”

He shook his head. “You should have had a system. We can do nothing without systems,” he told me, and he went on to describe his methods:

“I’d start in a town, any town, by the ocean. From there I’d travel all around the coast. Then I’d work my way inland by about ten miles or so and begin a second circle. And so on, and so on, until the circles became tighter and tighter by ten miles at a time, and I’d end up on the banks of the Shannon at Athlone, in the middle of the country. I called them my ‘ring roads.’ ”

“Did you ever keep count of the distances you walked?”

“I used to think that miles traveled amounted to some kind of feat. And I suppose you could say that was true. I changed, though, and measured myself by how few places I visited. Because that meant that they liked my stories and didn’t find me too bad.”

We may think that we scrutinize our parents while growing up. And I know that I did. I could tell when either of them hit a bad-tempered patch, or grew excited, or morose. Easy enough with my father, whose face was a movie screen. Mother, though, tended to hide her feelings—until she couldn’t, and then they became a lightning storm, flashing and crashing.

Never, though, not even with Venetia, have I focused on another human being as in those two years with John Jacob O’Neill. I watched everything he did, every gesture he made, every step he took. Now I can see that I was relearning life. Having not only failed at everything I had done but traveled to the very underworld of baseness and vile deed, I needed a lifeline. At the time I wouldn’t have couched it like that; looking back, I can see it clear as day.

Was I tempted at all to confide in him? Of course I was. There were
moments in almost every day when I felt the words of confession lingering behind my teeth. Why didn’t they pour out? He stopped them. Not by anything he did or said but by his own simple being.

He had a reserve about him, a distance he could put between himself and the world. Nothing splashed him. Sudden and difficult moments didn’t come his way. The humdrum pressings we all experience never wrinkled the fabric of his life. Not once in those two years with him—and never thereafter—did I see him having to deal with a difficulty.

How did he do it? How did he manage his world so well? It didn’t look like control. He didn’t chide people or challenge them. Things didn’t go wrong—or so it seemed. His electricity bill arrived the first week I was there, claiming an amount eight times his annual costs. He wrote the agency a calm letter, enclosing a check for the same amount as the last bill, and asked if someone would look into it. The fish truck arrived one day with no fish. He joked with the man, and never asked him—in justifiable irritation—why he’d bothered to call with an empty van.

You must remember that I had never seen such a steady human being. My father, Harry, brought turmoil into every corner of his life. Mother dashed close behind him, putting out his fires. James Clare, with whom I had traveled a little, fought a rearguard action against his own lungs. Miss Fay tidied everything around herself—all the time.

And I? What was I like? I didn’t know. Had you asked me, when you first met me, to describe myself and how I conducted my life—I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. From John Jacob O’Neill, though, I learned that I had no life system worth anything.

He found only one part of my work ethic that he could applaud. (Not that he decried me: not once did he criticize me.) He admired only the neatness of my car interior and my briefcase and notebooks.

“If you were a tradesman,” he said to me, “I can tell that you’d have all your tools in neat rows on the wall.”

I still bask in that.

In short, he rebuilt me. Within days I had adopted his regime—not that I had a choice. I rose precisely, came to breakfast at exactly half past eight, took my hour and my two-hour breaks to the minute, went to sleep at the same time every night. And slept—which surprised me.

As to my soul and its guilt and remorse—that remained. Almost undimmed.
Not a day passed that I didn’t see those three riddled corpses, and the black pools of blood on the floors of that seedy house. At some point every morning I caught the smell; in fact, it often preceded the wonderful smell of John Jacob’s baking, as though the gods wished to remind me of the foul odors I had caused to be released into the world.

He sensed that something deep troubled me. Or did I frantically wish him to sense it? So that I could confess to him. To anyone? I controlled, as best I could, my bad moments; their worst attacks came in the first two weeks, when my mind hadn’t yet engaged with the material I had come to learn.

I persevered. We concluded that first learning period with a plan: when he deemed me fit, we would indeed take to the road, and he would indeed once again become a traveling storyteller. “We’ll print a poster,” he boomed, with mischief in his eyes. “ ‘Coming Attraction.’ ”

I so wished him to ask me questions about Venetia and me. He never mentioned her name. And I so wished him to ask questions about the Folklore Commission. He never did—but he did reply to a letter from the officials, refusing to see them, and he left the letter and his reply lying around before he sent it. So that I could read it.

A tiredness swept over me after a few days, and so afflicted me that I fell into a deep sleep every night. Yet the morning saw me refreshed and alert, with no stiffness or aches. It took days for me to realize that this was new. In due course I put it down to routine.

When I mentioned it to John Jacob, he said, “The cows of the fields have their routine, haven’t they? They get milked morning and evening, and if they’re not they let everyone know about it.”

At last the training in narrative began in earnest. I wanted to drive down on the Sunday night, such was my excitement, but I held back, not wishing to impose upon his own routine. In fact, I arrived at his lane an hour early that Monday and parked a little distance away, backing the car up
the same old cart track I had sped into with Venetia when fleeing Little Boy.

You know those mornings when you can hear a bell from across the sea? I heard a distant laugh, voices, then an engine being started. John Jacob’s was the only house within sight or earshot.

The cart track gave excellent cover from the road. Through the bushes I saw a car, newish, emerge from the lane, driven by a woman. To judge from the confident way she drove out onto the larger road, she knew this place.

I had a fragmented view of her; condensation masked the windows of her car. Was she blond? Not sure. She wore a head scarf, and she had a stylish and well-to-do air, not at all the type of woman commonly seen in that countryside of farms and cottages. Age? Couldn’t tell. Not a girl in her twenties; more mature.

She changed gears directly in front of me, slowing down a fraction to do so. If I had to swear to it, I wouldn’t have been able to identify her. Nor would I have been able to swear that it wasn’t Venetia.

I dismissed the thought. Who could be less likely to have visited John Jacob? And who could be more likely than I to imagine that he was spending time with Venetia? I glimpsed her everywhere. An illusion, as you know.

However, one assumption stood out: when somebody is leaving somebody else’s house at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, they’ve likely stayed overnight. Or for the weekend.

Inside, I found no trace of a visitor. Nor did I see breakfast crockery, neither for one nor for two—he had cleared everything before I arrived. But he did that every Monday morning.

My storytelling lessons began with form, not content. We spent many weeks on technique. He began each frame of teaching with a question, his first being “Do you ever go to the cinema?”

“I do. Often.”

“What’s the first thing that happens when the picture begins?”

I said, “There’s the title, and the names of the actors, and the most important people working on it.”

“Anything else?”

“Often there’s a piece of writing or a place and a date.”

“And what’s the purpose of all that information?”

“To tell you who everyone is,” I said.

“But they often tell us about a whole lot of people at the end. So why don’t they keep the information from the beginning till the end?”

“Because they want it to be seen? Before people get up and leave?”

“I always stay and watch every name,” he said. “I feel I should. In order to honor their work. But that’s beside the point. Before I answer my own question let me ask you something else: what do I do before I begin to tell you a story?”

“You fiddle with your pipe. You lay everything out beside you. You make sure to be organized.”

“And why do I do all that?”

I said, “So that you’ll tell the story better.”

John Jacob nodded. “Fair enough. But what I’m doing is exactly the same as the cinema. I’m giving you time to settle down, and I’m creating anticipation. That’s the first step in storytelling: appetite.”

“Shouldn’t I be taking notes?”

He said, “You can write all this down tonight, if you like, but if we were back two thousand years ago, you’d be memorizing it all. Now, what’s the next step?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

He said, “Authority. You must make the audience comfortable. To do that, you need authority. You have to make them feel that the story is entirely yours to command. You can do this in a number of ways—by making a quiet beginning or having a humorous start. Humor suggests confidence. Or a mischievous one—mischief is good, too. We’ll elaborate on all these points every day. Two ingredients, so far, right?”

“Appetite.” I counted on my fingers. “Authority.”

“What’s the third ingredient? Address,” he said. “Did you ever play golf?”

“No. My father did.”

“In golf, the golfer ‘addresses’ the ball. The storyteller addresses things in an even more vital way—he addresses the audience and the story. By this I mean he speaks to the audience as though they were his creatures, and nobody else’s. And he behaves toward the words coming out of his own mouth as if there could be no other words feasible ever again. That’s what I mean by Address. Intense focus.”